E-Cigarette reviews for the rest of us

IJOY Tornado Nano Review

Do you like sub-ohm tanks? Do you like them even more when they include RBA decks? The IJOY Tornado Nano is one of the most interesting attempts that I’ve ever seen to bring e-cigarette users the best of both worlds.

A sub-ohm tank with an RBA deck has a lot of appeal for many e-smokers. Pre-made coils are very convenient, and they’re also a lot safer than rebuildable coils. Since they should be factory-tested, there’s little chance of a pre-made coil having a short unless you’ve done something yourself to cause damage. On the other hand, it’s great to have an RBA deck available along with some wire and cotton for those times when you’re a little short on cash or waited a bit too long to order new coils.

The problem with most RBA decks, though, is that they’re about the same size as the pre-made coils that they replace. In other words, they provide very little room in which to build and probably don’t generate as much vapor. The VaporFi Volt Hybrid Tank is a good example of this problem; the pre-made coils are great, but it’s almost impossible to get the same performance from the RBA deck.

A New Breed of Sub-Ohm Tank

The IJOY Tornado Nano is a sub-ohm tank that tackles this problem in reverse. Instead of including an RBA deck that looks like a small pre-made coil, it has very large drop-in coils that look like RBAs. The difference in vapor production, if you’re switching from a sub-ohm tank with small pre-made coils, is enormous. The IJOY Tornado Nano is a finicky tank, though, and it’s difficult to keep it working smoothly.

Heaven Gifts provided this tank to me for review purposes. View it on their website. The IJOY Tornado Nano costs $30.90. Use the coupon code AGRL10 when checking out for a 10 percent discount on all items from Heaven Gifts.

IJOY Tornado Nano Update: Now that I’ve owned the IJOY Tornado Nano for several months, my opinion of the tank has changed slightly. Yes, the threads are incredibly finicky. Trying to hold and unscrew a tiny chuff tip for refilling without loosening any of the tank’s several other threads is really, really hard. Once you get used to the threads, though, filling the tank without experiencing a leak is not so tough.

If you switch to the RBA deck, though, avoiding leaks is very hard indeed. I revisited the IJOY Tornado Nano after discovering a new product over at VaporFi — a canister of 10 pre-wrapped nichrome alien coils for $7.99. I dropped those into the RBA deck of the Tornado Nano, and that’s when I discovered the tank’s second problem: the wick holes on the RBA deck are really, really big. Even if you think you’ve done everything right, you could get halfway through filling the tank only to realize that you’ve got e-liquid all over your hand. You can’t stuff the holes too tightly, though, because then the tank won’t wick efficiently. I found an excellent video that helped, but I still had to stick to filling the tank halfway to keep the tank from dumping.

With all of the quirks of the IJOY Tornado Nano, I still have trouble giving it a strong recommendation even though I find myself using it quite often these days. There are so many tanks out there that just work. You don’t have to worry about lining the threads up just right or arranging the wick just so to get the tank to work without leaking.

That being said, the Tornado Nano generates far more vapor than any tank that I’ve ever used — and it does so without constant spitting and gurgling. The Tornado Nano also doesn’t produce the “wet” vapor with larger droplets that dilute the flavor, as so many high-output tanks tend to. If you’re willing to put up with a more challenging maintenance routine than you typically require with a sub-ohm tank, the experience of actually using the IJOY Tornado Nano is a very good one indeed.

About the IJOY Tornado Nano

To begin this review, let’s examine the IJOY Tornado Nano at a glance. The IJOY Tornado Nano is:

A sub-ohm tank with a 510 connection and capacity of 4 ml.

A tank with very large pre-made coils that resemble rebuildable atomizers. Coils cost just $10 per pack of five and come in 0.3 and 0.6 ohm varieties.

A tank that includes a large two-post RBA, enabling you to complete dual-coil builds in a snap.

A tank with a removable top cap to make filling easier.

The IJOY Tornado Nano also has several unusual gimmicks that make it somewhat unique among sub-ohm tanks. These include:

Heaven Gifts provided an IJOY Tornado Nano review pack that included the retail tank package with one pre-built coil and one RBA deck, an extra pre-built coil and two color-changing glass enclosures.

IJOY Tornado Nano Review

The most important thing that I could possibly get across in this review is the fact that the IJOY Tornado Nano is a traditional sub-ohm tank with pre-built coils, but in operation it behaves more like a rebuildable atomizer. The Tornado Nano uses two very large triple-twisted coils with ample cotton wicks. The coils have plenty of surface area for vaporization, and they’re rated for operation at up to 80 watts. If you’re used to sub-ohm tanks with smaller pre-built coils such as the aforementioned Volt Hybrid Tank, the Tornado Nano is going to throw clouds like you’ve never seen.

A Problem With Sub-Ohm Tanks

One of the problems I’ve experienced with sub-ohm tanks has to do with the recent increased popularity of sweeter e-liquids. As the vaping community has matured, many e-smokers haven’t used actual tobacco in so long that they’ve stopped thinking about that flavor entirely. Instead, they simply want to vape the flavors that they find most delicious. E-liquid makers have responded with wide arrays of dessert, cereal and beverage flavors — and almost all of them contain sweeteners.

Unfortunately, sweeteners seldom vaporize fully. Instead, they stick to the wick and coil, eventually forming a black film that burns and alters the taste of the vapor. The vaping community uses the unscientific term “gunk” to describe the film that sweet e-liquids leave behind — and the gunk problem is so bad that a sweet e-liquid can easily ruin the flavor of a coil in just a day or two of moderate use. Since a typical pre-made coil costs around $2-3, coil gunk can make sweet e-liquids really expensive to enjoy if you care about the flavor.

Solving the Problem of Coil Gunk

Is it an RBA? Nope. It’s a factory-made coil that drops right in to the IJOY Tornado Nano.

The increased vapor production is one reason why rebuildable atomizers are so popular, but it isn’t the only reason. The other reason is the fact that coils are very inexpensive to build — and people who prefer sweet e-liquids need new coils frequently.

A lot of the time, though, they aren’t actually building entirely new coils from scratch because the coils themselves still work fine. It’s the wick that causes the problem. If you have a rebuildable atomizer, you can simply pull the wick out, “dry burn” the coil until the gunk is gone and insert a new wick. The coil will perform almost as well as one built from scratch.

So, re-wicking solves the coil gunk problem for RBA users. Just try to re-wick a traditional pre-built coil for a sub-ohm tank, though. Since you can’t open most pre-built coils without cutting through the metal and there’s almost no room in which to work, the effort hardly seems worth it.

The IJOY Tornado Nano uses very wide pre-built coils with large openings. If you want to, you can easily pull the wicks out and replace them. IJOY’s coils are quite inexpensive to begin with. If you’d like to re-wick them yourself, though, the daily cost of using the IJOY Tornado Nano can potentially be far, far lower than that of other sub-ohm tanks.

IJOY Tornado Nano Review: How It Works

So, at this point I hope that you have a good idea of why the IJOY Tornado Nano might interest you. Is it actually a tank that you’re going to want to buy, though? I’ll begin with the good points.

In terms of vapor production, the Tornado Nano is a spectacularly good tank. It generates the biggest vapor clouds I’ve ever seen from a tank with factory-made coils, and it also goes through e-liquid much more quickly. If you chain vape, you can expect to drain the Tornado Nano in as little as 30 minutes. The difference in vapor production really is astounding for someone who has spent little time experimenting with self-built coils.

I am extremely happy with my current daily driver — the tank included with the Halo Tracer e-cigarette — but if you’re using a standard sub-ohm tank and you’re not getting the vapor production that you want, you’ll almost certainly get it from the IJOY Tornado Nano.

IJOY Tornado Nano Review: The Drawbacks

The IJOY Tornado Nano has some issues in the quality of its machining. Mine came with the short, wide, “chuff tip,” and I noticed that if I used the Tornado Nano with the entire tip in my mouth, vaping occasionally became uncomfortable because the top cap of the tank isn’t smoothed at all.

The threading is another negative aspect of the IJOY Tornado Nano’s build quality. It’s easy to take the entire tank apart to replace the glass, which I did right away because I wanted to try one of the color-changing enclosures. Getting the tank back together without cross-threading is extremely difficult — much more so than just about any tank I’ve ever owned — and if you don’t get the threads right, the tank will certainly leak.

The threading is even more problematic when you try to actually fill the tank. You’re supposed to fill the tank by removing the top cap, but it’s hard to get the top cap to disengage without disengaging the bottom as well and dumping the tank’s contents.

IJOY Tornado Nano Review: The Gimmicks

I had difficulty getting the color-changing glass of the IJOY Tornado Nano to work during vaping.

I was able to test two of the Tornado Nano’s three gimmicks during the review process. My review sample didn’t include one of the LED-lit coils, so I can’t comment on the way they look.

I did get a couple of color-changing glass enclosures, though. They readily become clear under hot water and return to their original opaque state when cool. I found it difficult to get the glass to change color when I was actually vaping, though. That being said, I reviewed the tank in an air conditioned environment and didn’t chain vape.

One thing that does seem to work very well, however, is the IJOY chip coil. To create the coil, IJOY solders the wire to a PCB. Using the PCB, IJOY claims, improves electrical conductivity and encourages heat to dissipate quickly. I can’t deny that IJOY’s claims appear valid; the Tornado Nano works happily at very high wattage settings and puts out an astronomical amount of vapor without feeling overly hot.

The Bottom Line

The IJOY Tornado Nano is a tank that tries to bring you the performance of an RBA and the convenience of a tank with drop-in coils. From a performance standpoint, it works admirably by generating the most vapor that I’ve ever seen from factory-made coils without ever becoming overly hot during use.

From a usage standpoint, I would say that the success of the Tornado Nano is debatable. In my experience, it tends to be leaky. That’s because it’s very difficult to remove the top cap for filling. It’s also very hard to get all of the threads to line up properly when disassembling the tank for a glass or coil change.

In the end, the IJOY Tornado Nano lacks the reliability and quality machine work that would make it an easy tank to recommend to anyone looking for huge vapor clouds. It you’re willing to put up with the quirky threads, there’s a lot here to love. You’ll get big vapor, and you’ll get a nice large RBA deck for building your own coils. If you like sweet e-liquids, you won’t need to replace coils as often as you would with some other tanks, because you can replace the wicks in the factory-made coils whenever you like.

As a dripping atomizer, the IJOY Tornado Nano might be the best I’ve ever used. As a tank, though, the lack of quality machining makes the Tornado Nano come up a bit short.

Heaven Gifts provided this tank to me for review purposes. View it on their website. The IJOY Tornado Nano costs $30.90.

IJOY Tornado Nano Review: The Pros

Sub-ohm tank with the huge vapor clouds of an RBA

Inexpensive factory-made coils that you can re-wick easily

“Chip coil” technology really does seem to work

LED lighting and color-change glass are fun gimmicks that some will enjoy

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About Vapegrl

Hi, I'm Vapegrl and this is my e-cigarette review website. I started e-smoking four years ago to rid myself of a nasty tobacco habit, and since then I've tried just about every e-cigarette and e-liquid I could find in the never-ending search for the perfect vape. Now I'd like to pass on some of the things I've learned. I hope you enjoy my e-cigarette reviews and guide.